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Welcome back to another episode of the Homegrown Liberty Podcast, this is episode 38. And today I’m going to be doing a homestead update episode! This is where I tell you what all we’ve been up to, how things have been going, and what we have coming up! But I can’t tell you the secret just yet. I promise I’m working hard, but there’s lots of exciting things happening all at once and I have to pick and choose my battles! Only so many things get my attention each week and that particular thing keeps getting pushed back just a little bit. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to let you guys in on some part of it!
But let’s just get into what all has happened recently!

A Rough Summer

As most of you regular listeners know, we had a rough summer. I got sick with something like the flu after Catie was starting to recover. And I dunno exactly what it was but it took me out for at least a week. During that time, Catie didn’t know all the things that needed to be taken care of, added to that, she was still weak and recovering, and all three kids were also getting over being sick as well. And we lost a ton of seedling trees. You see I arrogantly assumed I would be able to handle taking care of all those seedling trees by myself out near the garden. I thought, “I don’t need to install any automated irrigation. I need to check on things every day or every other day anyways, so I’ll need to be out here anyways. I’ll just water by hand, that will be easier.” Well guess what…. I was wrong. Out of the ten thousand seedling white mulberry trees, I might have 20 left. The five thousand or so black mulberry, there are two left alive. Lots of other losses… 1 of my chinese chestnuts remains alive out of 20 or 30.

The garden is a wreck. After that two week period of time I just threw in the towel and chalked it up to a lost cause. I’ll chop and drop, then cover crop for winter and see how it goes next year with a different purpose. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The point here is that no matter if you think you can handle doing things yourself. It’s always best to set yourself up for simplicity and ease of maintenance. If I had set up automated irrigation, then I would have been fine. Catie could have just looked at things to make sure everything was working fine and been done with any nursery work. We would have kept thousands of dollars worth of trees alive, and had the seedling trees to plant this winter. Now I’ll be another year behind because I’ll have to wait another year to stratify, sprout, and grow up the seedlings for another year before planting.

If you can automate something, DO IT! If you can set up your system for easy, low time cost maintenance, you set yourself up for success. I’m going to be doing a lot more automation this winter and going into spring. I don’t want to have those same types of problems in the future. So I’ll be documenting how I do all that so I can teach you how! I want you guys to be able to learn from my mistakes and bypass years of lost time and skip tens of thousands of dollars in lost finances due to preventable and costly mistakes. I plan on being your guinea pig, the one who takes the hard hits with trying out things and learning what works, and what doesn’t. I hope to be able to show you shortcuts to success, and help you figure out practical cost saving methods to build resiliency in your life.

I Hate Ducks

There I said it… I severely dislike our ducks. They have to be the most annoying bird I’ve ever had the mispleasure of dealing with. I much prefer chickens. Ducks are annoying, they go where ever I don’t want want them, eat everything I don’t want them to eat, destroy things for no other reason than seeming pleasure of destruction. They don’t do any real meaningful work for me. There just aren’t enough good reasons to keep them. If I had good fencing up to keep them on the lake then maybe I wouldn’t mind them as much but they are just loud, annoying UGH I don’t like them. I do like the muscovies though, much less annoying and good at pest control. Chickens however I love! They’ll do lots of meaningful work for me, and my family likes the eggs much more than duck eggs. Now please don’t take this to mean I don’t want ducks or that you shouldn’t get ducks, or that there’s no good use for the birds because that’s not true, they are very useful in some situations, just not useful to me right now and a constant source of irritation. Catie thought I should share my thoughts with you guys, probably because she’s tired of hearing me say how much I hate the ducks.

Mexican Sunflower For Sale!

August has been remarkably rainy! That’s a wonderful blessing for us considering we normally don’t get much more than an inch of rain total from the month of June through the middle of October. In August it rained almost every day. Sure there were a couple weeks where we had no rain for a couple days at a time, but for the most part, the ground was always wet and that really helped things grow like crazy! I have Mexican Sunflower that got to about 15 feet tall before laying the huge pot over that it was growing in. This was a pot that was sized for a 15 foot tree to grow in, so I’m not talking about a little thing. Then after it laid over, it rooted along the stems, and grew again, this time another 3 or 4 feet tall from the sides of the stalks! I plan on taking lots of cuttings to root over the course of winter and hold a couple hundred cuttings over winter in pots indoors to plant extensively in the spring.

If you don’t know about that plant, it’s just simply amazing how fast it grows and how much biomass it will build in a growing season. I grew that plant from a single cutting to a massive shrub the size of a tree in one growing season this year. I’m really looking forward to using it as a sun block and hedge. The leaves are a great protein source for animals, and the whole plant makes a fantastic chop and drop that will fertilize your plants wherever you let it rot. I’ll be growing a lot of it!

In fact, if you’re interested in getting some cuttings from me, email me with “Plant Cuttings” in the subject line. I’ll take some orders and ship rooted cuttings in the mail to anybody who wants to buy some. Let’s say $7 flat rate shipping box, and $3 per cutting. This isn’t a guaranteed thing, I’ll need to get enough people together to make it worth my while to root a ton of cuttings. But I’d like to see what kind of response there is first. As far as I know the seeds are very hard to come by and quite expensive. That’s why I’ve been propagating it via cuttings. I have some rooting right now, I’ll see how well they do, and if I have enough people email me wanting some, then I’ll email you back to let you know where you can send your payment and get them shipped out! So if you’re interested in cuttings of this awesome plant send me an email to nick@homegrownliberty.com with “Plant Cuttings” in the subject line of the email. If you don’t put that in the email, I won’t get your message!! This is Tithonia diversifolia, also called mexican sunflower. It’s not an invasive, won’t really spread unless you want it to, but grows fast, tall and produces a lot of leaves and stems that you can feed your rabbits, goats, sheep, cattle, lots of things. One of my favorite plants because of how much it brings to the table and it’s going to be a foundational plant in the early years while I’m waiting on white mulberry and others to grow enough to use as fodder. I’ll offer more for sale in the spring, but if you want to get some cuttings now, keep them in a sunny window over the winter to have nice well established plants to set out in the spring, then you definitely want to get em quick. I have no idea how many of you guys will want these plants, but it’s first come first served. I’ll fill requests in the order that I get the emails.

The Consulting Tour

The first ten days of September were spent on a consulting tour that was quite the whirlwind. I really like to do these tours because it really helps me get to more homesteads and to help more people than I would have been able to. Plus it really cuts down on the travel costs and makes it a lot more affordable for you guys. Depending on how things go, I might end up doing another consulting tour in the spring. So if you want to express interest in that, shoot me an email with “Consulting” in the subject line so I can sort things easier. So anyways, since a couple people have asked about it all, I figured I’d let yall in on what all I did on the trip!

Day 1:

I started out headed to Hot Springs Arkansas for a short consult and mostly a night’s stay. We talked a bunch about fruit tree maintenance, helping them to get more production from them. Also helped them to head off some problems with muscadine grape production. It was nice being able to stop by and check on progress from a year ago.

Day 2:

Was a full day consult near Little Rock. Really cool situation there, nice mature and productive planted oak forest with Bur Oak, Pin Oak, Shumard Oak and a couple others. Perfectly setup for rotating pigs through in the fall and finishing them off with some awesome acorn drop. The rest of the forest is nice and cleared and would be great for pushing turkeys, goats, chickens or pigs through. Lots and lots of potential there. I’m looking forward to seeing how they develop their property!

Day 3:

The next day I was up right across the Missouri border to a really cool location on a hillside with a great topography for swales and ponds. And it’s the kind of landscape that is really fun to work with, easy to read, fun to develop. I’d love to have some property that has topography like they have to work with. Sure there are some issues with stony soils, but man, lots of potential for sure. And it looks like I will likely be helping them install a couple ponds and at least a single swale system to catch the water for the ponds. That sounds like a great project and a lot of fun.

Day 4:

Off to another brand new homestead site. And this one was one of the best reasons to have someone like me to help you think through your plans before you start building and such. Literally as I drove up the clients were marking out a driveway where they thought the best location was. After we talked for a little while, I pointed out a better location for the building and we worked on their priorities and found out that changing the building location lowered their costs to build, lowered the cost for the driveway, and gave them several more advantages and reduced some future costs to building and developing their property. All in all I think I probably saved them around ten thousand in building costs and future development just with smart placement.

Day 5:

Was Sunday and the day of the Garlic Festival in St Louis, pretty fun, I saw a couple of the listeners from the podcast, I won’t mention all your names for privacy sake but you know who you are, hi guys! Fun times at the festival!

Day 6:

I got to pick out a ton of rare and unique varieties of garlic from Mark’s stores. I’ll be planting them all soon and we’ll see which ones do the best for us here in Louisiana. The plan is to pick the best performers and try them, then we’ll narrow our selection to maybe a dozen different kinds of garlic to grow every year. I hope to have garlic to sell in a year or two once I’ve built things up to decent production levels. The nice thing is we have a long growing season, so they can put on a lot of growth every year. From St Louis I had an almost 6 hour drive to a little South of Nashville where I stayed with one of the listeners, they had me over for supper and we just visited and had a good time.

Day 7:

I had a half day at a really cool location East of Nashville with a nice family there. They have a great location that has some beautiful potential. There’s a wonderful view, a creek running along one side of the property, a great pasture, a barn, and a fantastic pond location high in the landscape. I really like this place and I’m looking forward to seeing what these guys do with their landscape. Then I headed a couple hours to the East to the next consult!

Day 8:

This was a full day consult deep in the holler in Tennessee. And lemme tell ya, the road to this place is not a road I would want to brave in icy weather. Yikes!

But the basic thoughts are that it’s a rocky difficult location but we were able to get some great plans laid and some really good organization set up for the animals and garden. The new orientation will cut down significantly on their workload and build more fertility than they have been able to just by rearranging where animals are located. We also did a lot of planning on how to manage overgrown areas better to obtain a yield while making it look nicer, cut down on maintenance and time involved in keeping the grass and brush cut. I think they are going to really like the difference this makes in their day to day life as they start to implement these plans and see the changes start to take place.

Day 9:

Now I’m feeling like I’m on the home stretch, starting to come back east and south a little bit to a full day consult in Northern Alabama on a property overlooking a bluff. And lemme tell ya, this place is beautiful, wonderful contour to the land and lots of opportunity for water harvest and utilization. This client had one of her friends along to walk the property with us and we had a great time talking about how to develop and plan everything out. We had enough time to sit down and sketch everything out on paper, we got pretty deeply into house layout and the zone 1 area where their garden, greenhouse, outdoor processing kitchen would go and lots more. They have a pond already on site that needs cleaned out and sealed, I think they decided to go with fencing it and putting in pigs after they rework the pond. That should seal it up nicely and leave them with a sizeable water feature and some bacon as well! She was really happy and excited to have a solid plan to move forward. After finishing up there around dark I head off to Ken’s place an hour and a half away.

Day 10:

At Ken’s and I’m pretty wiped out, we recorded a conversation as you heard from last week, If you haven’t heard it yet then you really should check it out. We walked their property and it had been pretty much a year since I was there last so a LOT had changed. We had a good time, I got to recharge a little bit, almost finished a jigsaw puzzle, taught Edie some more plant propagation stuff (she’s 11 I think) and they sent me home with a breeding trio of grey muscovies and a couple extra ducklings.

Day 11:

My last stop was only a 2 hour consult and we covered house site, helped him plan out garden bed location and how to set things up and the sequence to set the beds up to be easiest and best. I helped him figure out how to advantage a lot of his trees and we did some troubleshooting on his swale and fruit trees. Quick consult, and helped him understand how to build things on contour a lot better.

Then I got on the road for another 8 hours before I got home finally and collapsed on the couch!

Lord this was a long trip, but I helped a lot of people and had a lot of fun too. So it was a good trip. And the best part is that nothing died while I was gone except for the milk cow! As for future plans, I’ll keep it short cause this took a lot longer to cover than I expected.

Future Plans!

I have a trip coming up that takes me south to Baton Rouge Louisiana to do two short consults and to pick up a bunch of amazing chickens from a wonderful listener who lives down there. I know it’s not a huge thing but I’m getting two dozen laying hens from this listener and it’s going to go quite a ways to replacing a lot of lost productivity on our homestead. With everything that happened in June, and the milk cow dying during my consulting tour, well, it would be nice to have something positive happening for a change! So I’m really excited about getting these new birds!

I have the rabbits moved to next to the house, I have a small batch of eggs I hatched that have grown up to fully feathered. These were eggs from my survivor chickens that I’ve been breeding for the past 5 years, so that’s a good thing! Really glad I have those birds to grow up this winter. They’re going to join the rest of the survivors out at the old chicken barn and the new birds will get some new digs closer to the house and keep the bloodlines true. I don’t want crossbreeding between the Black Copper Marans and what I’ll likely call Homestead Hardy if they survive this year and continue the breeding line. Only the toughest ones and most predator evasive birds have made it and these are mostly a cross between Cuckoo Maran (the English clean legged version) and Black Australorp. Love those birds, they lay a normal brown egg but lay very well through all sorts of conditions, are first rate foragers, and are by necessity fantastic at not getting eaten by foxes, dogs, coyotes, coons, possums, owls, or hawks. So I think they’re pretty good! I’ve maintained this flock through a couple major thinnings by predator attacks. Both times I lost a couple dozen birds.

We’re going to be taking down some trees on the east side of the house to bring in some sunlight to the east facing slope where we will be building raised beds that will run right up against the house. I’ll be taking video of the whole process from start to finish for you guys. I’ll also be showing you a cheap and easy way to find your contour lines that is more reliable than a laser level and doesn’t cost you $700. I’ll be able to measure out contour points up to 100’ in distance before having to reset, but resetting only takes a few seconds. This is a super cool, and affordable means of marking your contour lines. It’s not as fast as using a laser level, but it’s more foolproof for finding straight contour.

We’re going to be making some elderberry tincture, and some homemade bug repellent. Man the mosquitoes are bad this time of year, we’re still getting days where the high is in the mid nineties and the skeeters are trying to make us all anemic every time we walk outside! Lots of things happening in the next few weeks.

Also! There are two weeks until the Redeeming the Dirt conference in Gadsden AL! You definitely want to be at this thing if it’s at all possible! Please check out the website http://www.redeemingthedirt.com/

I’ll be there teaching about homesteading and plant propagation. The big names there will be Brian Oldrives and Joel Salatin! So I want you all to be there if you can! If you register, please use the discount code we set up for all my listeners! HL15 for a 15% discount on your ticket!

The event details are:

October 7th-8th, 2016 at Meadowbrook Baptist Church in Gadsden, Alabama.

All conference admission fees include lunch and supper on Friday and Saturday!

Registration Pricing:

$120: Adult Price ($102 with discount code HL15)

$55: Child (12 and under, babies free)

The link to register is here:

https://redeemingthedirt.regfox.com/redeeming-the-dirt-conference

Please check it out and I hope to see you there!

 
Until next week   I hope you have a wonderful day, God Bless. And as always “Go Do Good Things”